In which I gaze at my widening virtual navel (& photo friday on sunday)

For me thanksgiving is all about the Food and the Family (F is for… ) We go to my cousin’s house, have a delicious meal (eat way too much – I wish I could do a 48 hour square bolus for thanksgiving) and enjoy seeing relatives I don’t get to see often enough. When I was younger, I found the whole family thing overwhelming and stifling, but I think I’ve mellowed and my family has mellowed as well.

I made a baked brie (world’s simplest appetizer: take frozen puff pastry sheets, defrost. I was supposed to roll them out but I forgot and it turned out fine. Place wheel of brie in center of frozen puff pastry sheet. Top with canned organic whole berry cranberry sauce or the preserves of your choice. Fold puff pastry sheet around brie. Top with second puff pastry sheet. Brush with egg yolk and milk. Bake on cookie sheet at 400 for 10 minutes and 350 for 30-40 minutes until brown. Listen to your family admire you.)

I also baked two really kickass pies, which I forgot to photograph before my family demolished them. The pecan pie recipe in particular is mind-blowing. I upped the pecans a bit (two cups) and toasted them lightly. Oh, and I used the Pâte brisée recipe from Joy of Cooking for the crust. Make sure to freeze the butter beforehand, and use ice water and crust-making is Not That Hard.

The F is for Family pictures are friends-only on flickr. Make me a flickr-friend and I will surely reciprocate, unless you’re George Bush.

I hope everyone who celebrates it had a lovely thanksgiving. I enjoy the idea of a holiday for giving thanks. I try to avoid thinking about its nasty imperialist origins and stay away from the pilgrim hats and cartoon native americans. I’m thankful for Pili and for the family we are making together. I’m thankful for my family of origin, who love and support us, and for my family of choice, who sustain us. And, I’m thankful for the internet and for the virtual communities I’ve found on it. Which brings me to my virtual navel gazing (widening thanks to those thanksgiving pies)…

When I first started my blogroll, I thought a fair bit about how I was going to set it up. I deliberately didn’t want to differentiate between people who were coming to parenting through adoption and people who were trying to get pregnant, or who were pregnant.

I didn’t want to differentiate between queer families trying to conceive and non-queer folks who were also trying to get themselves knocked up. I didn’t want to draw a line between new moms (plural) getting frustrated that their kid wasn’t interested in the boob and new moms (singular) getting similarly frustrated. I wanted you to click on a link and maybe have it take you somewhere you wouldn’t go intentionally – but where you might discover an ally you wouldn’t have expected to have. Along the same lines, I haven’t separated out people with type 1 vs. people with type 2 vs. parents of kids with diabetes. By not putting people in boxes, I hoped, as grandiose as it sounds, and it sounds plenty grandiose to me, to help break down the edges of some of those boxes a bit. I’m not sure if that’s worked.

On the other hand, sharing categories has helped me to see what I share with people whom I might otherwise, honestly, have a) never gotten to know, and b) never given a chance, without the shared fact of diabetes or adoption or both to bring us together. And I am (once again) thankful for that.

Oh, and by the way, Andrea has had a bunch of reallyinterestingpostsaboutbreaking downboundaries in the blogworld. Read them and realize that she is a far more thoughtful human being and a better writer than I am. Also, I’m linking to every single post because, there doesn’t seem to be a category for these posts. And there should be!

Right now I have blogs on my blogroll that are marked private. This is not because I am deliberately keeping things from you, but mostly because listing them as public would make my blogroll very long and unwieldy – whenever I find a blog that looks interesting, that I might someday want to come back to, I try to subscribe to it. And I also have a number of blogs that I don’t know how to categorize – firstmoms writing about their experiences, friends in real life, cooking blogs, etc. etc. There are um, over 500 blogs on my bloglines account. And no, I don’t read them all every day. I just collect blogs the way some people collect pets or precious moments figurines or shot glasses… Yes, I feel a little sheepish about this.

And by the way, if your blog gives you the option to publish an rss feed – please, please do it. I am just too damn lazy to go in and update my html every time I find a new blog. Much easier to let bloglines do it for me. This is why the wonderful ladies at babycakes are not on my blogroll, damnit.

So the question: should I reorganize? do you want more categories? fewer categories? what do I do with people who fall into multiple categories?

Advertisements

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

Thanks for that interesting post, particularly about your blogroll (I’m sorry, but brie in pastry just does not appeal!). I’ve found several interesting blogs through your blogroll but I don’t think that categories necessarily discourage me. I promise to continue to click forward indiscriminately.

Art, I really think you worry too much. lol It is your blogroll and you should make it easy for you to maneuver.
I also want to say that I am really glad that we have had the opportunity to “meet” by this wonderful internet world.

My blogroll is on Bloglines and I have it broadly arranged by adoptees (though that is certainly not all they are, it IS their main blog focus) parents (though they are not all parents with children, some are wannabes, some are already parents and some are first parents–and being parents is not all they blog about either!) and “More Personal blogs” for those who defy categories. Then there are the magazine style multiple contributor blogs that I categorize broadly by topic.

I do it that way for two reasons: 1) to help me keep track for my own reading and 2) to help others find blogs by special interest. But more and more I am trying to hang onto bloggers who are good writers, regardless of special interest.

What is really tough for me is dropping someone because I don’t want to read their blog anymore. I worry they will discover their disappearance and hate me. Maybe even kill me!! I angsted about that a lot, but once I started publishing my blogroll via Bloglines I felt more comfortable dropping and picking up blogs randomly, based on my whims of the day, so that no one would ever be able to keep track.

It helps me a lot to keep my blogroll on Bloglines; that way I can do things like this without changing the face of my blog much.

That’s just how I do it. I got no advice for ya, and am with those who say do it your way. I pay almost no attention to other peoples’ blogrolls unless someone is so incredibly brilliant that I figure they must know lots of other brilliant bloggers. Otherwise I pick up new blogs through the links in peoples’ posts, or sometimes from comments.

My mom’s a caterer and she makes that brie, but she adds walnuts too! If no one in your family is allergic, try it, it’s delicious!!

Also, I related to your reasoning for not segregating the blogs. I’m a type 1 diabetic who found your blog through sixuntilme.com and I’ve discovered lots of enlightening blogs from your site. I’ve found your site to be great way to expand my horizons and become educated!